Media Dragon

Daily Dose of Dust

Jozef Imrich has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut

Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Deception and divinity. For a thousand years, God’s power was linked with a powerful, humanlike trait – the ability to tell a lie... Even birds do it

When it came to self-destruction, Edgar Allan Poewas without peer. Liar, plagiarist, drunk, he died in a gutter wearing another man’s clothes... Brother Edgar “I want to create a mystery, not to solve it.” Still, without trying to “solve” these compositions, we can at least examine their construction.

Asset bubbles in shares and property could burst in the next six to 18 months, according to one of the country's more bearish investment experts, who is warning baby boomers that their retirement savings are at risk Boom is about to go Bust

Governance of Online Intermediaries:
Observations from a Series of National Case Studies Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2566364 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2566364Online intermediaries in various forms –
including search engines, social media, or app platforms – play a constitutive
role in today’s digital environment. They have become a new type of powerful
institution in the 21st century that shape the public networked sphere, and are
subject to intense and often controversial policy debates

A Southern Courier exit poll revealed 74 per cent of last night’s panel audience would vote for Maroubra MP Michael Daley at the March 28 election.
Greens candidate James Cruz won 13 per cent of the vote, and Liberal candidate Brendan Roberts gained 11 per cent
Light rail and overdevelopment in Botany Bay were the hot topics of the night. Michael Daley

Saturday, February 28, 2015

“We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ‘Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’”

So wrote Nobel prizewinner John Steinbeck - Stanford’s most illustrious drop-outGod is love, we are told. But Exodus tells us that God Himself says only that "I Am Who Am."Self-criticism is integral to our sense of self. What does this unrelenting, unforgiving, internal nag want? That hazards question... I am Rich?The biographer: glutton for anecdote, scavenger of detail, prisoner to tired conventions of chronology and storytelling ...Mom’s hands

From Gilgamesh on, theafterlife has taken many guises. Our view is an incoherent projection of needs and impulses, irreconcilably at oddsLiterary history is male-dominated. Literary journalism, too. But rest assured it is History of winners

... the tax office has begun to acknowledge the presence of the elephant in the room that is the billions lost to the nation's budget by multinational profit shifting. Albeit, they are still patting this elephant rather than proactively shooing it out of the room.

The very funding of our hospitals and schools is at stake here, our children's future, but the committee's modus operandi was more of a fireside chat than a grilling. It was apparently a matter for pride for the ATO that only one suspect was left on its "high-risk" list of corporate taxpayers (from 14 earlier). Westfield enshrines another challenge to revenue. It has restructured and shifted its tax base offshore and pays no tax here. Besides its $US2.3 billion in related party loans, loans to itself offshore that is, it lumped in income tax in the same line in the cash-flow statement as withholding tax, in apparent contravention to AASB107. Profitshifting tax office settles for-patting the elephant in the room

Mr Jordan claimed the culture of paying sources from banks or ­financial services firms meant there was an incentive to expose individuals with offshore accounts and those that facilitate them.

“You have to realise you can’t trust anyone any more. You either have disaffected employees or you want to sell information for money,” he said. “There was one European bank employee who sold data information to the US a few years ago and he got $102m.” Sunlight ; Ali Noroozi on uncertainties in tax treatments

But in what was the most disturbing revelation, House Member attendees were told that the IRS had not even asked for the backup tapes when the ‘hard drive crash’ excuse was first used. That contradicted the prior testimony of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. He had testified to the effect that recovery efforts had been thorough, and that the tapes couldn’t be accessed.

It’s important to note that this increase in revenue would be in the long run, after the economy has fully adjusted (probably about 10 years in the future). In the early years, federal revenue would fall before investment and growth pick up fully as the economy adjusts to a better tax system.

However, tax policy—all public policy, in fact—should be made with a focus on the long-term.

Tow Center for Data Journalism – December 3, 2014. Sensors and
Journalism: “This report you have opened is not monolithic. You can match
its sections to your needs. The first section introduces our topic. It starts by
describing the landscape where sensors and journalism combine, and continues on
to define necessary terms for understanding this area of research. Reporters are
using sensors in an era when the rapid development of technology is moving data
into the mainstream of journalism. The increasing ubiquity of sensors, their
increasing capability and accessibility are on the supply side, while
investigative reporters, computer aided reporters and journalist/technologists
are on the demand side.

Australia's 20 Best Business blogs: 2015, Broede Carmody, Eloise Keating and Kirsten Robb,
SmartCompany, 17 February 2015. This annual list of Australia's Best Business
Blogs are ones SmartCompany thinks offer the best free advice for small
business owners. From avoiding insolvency to using big data, there's something
for everyone. Business Bloggers DownUnder

"The structure of routine comforts us, and the specialness of ritual
vitalizes us," explains Maria Popova. "A full life calls for both — too
much control, and we become mummified; too little excitement and
pleasurable discombobulation, and we become numb. After all, to be
overly bobulated is to be dead inside — to doom oneself to a life devoid
of the glorious and ennobling messiness of the human experience."
She rejoices over a book by Anne Lamott on organizing our chaos with hope

Friday, February 27, 2015

In a prologue letter to her readers Hawkins says we are all voyeurs, gazing through windows on our morning commute, speculating about the lives of those whose homes and streets we pass The Girl on the train

We rarely in life say exactly what we mean, or what we want. In real speech, our humour and our pathos comes out in the longing beneath our words. Sometimes this is expressed in non sequiturs, the side-slips of conversation that reveal our lack of attention... He doesn't just show you what these people say and do; he shows you how they breathe. Breath. Dialogue, and its undercurrents, are always about breath. We breathe in, and on the outward breath we speak. Beneath the breath is the pause, the ribcage full of longing. We hold our breath with desire, with shock, expel it with fury. In the rhythm of breath is the secret of dialogue. A writer learns to listen to the words, but also to the silence, the pauses, the hesitation and the longing – the subtext – that lies beneath. All of that is in dialogue that pulls you not just along, but under. But it all begins with that first act, that careful moment of listening. Art of Dialogue

Under Cold River"...attempts at difference had the opposite effect to the one intended. For they emphasized that, in the midst of this randomness, you saw only the one identical expression: eyes staring into the distance, and lips held firmly shut as though against some pervasive infection Our people had collectively solved their shared problem, which was how to keep the mask in place, while showing that it is only a mask. People collaborated in the great deception, so as not to be deceived."

Scruton's book examines Prague life under the unrelenting pressure of communism, and it's desire to create sameness and eradicate personal opinions and choices. Seen most in the world of literature, where writers were commonly arrested and jailed, sometimes executed, the lack of freedom of expression was so controlled as to prevent personal thoughts. Just the idea of waving at someone insinuated a further connection, a nefarious plan under way.

The police were calculating and cold in their efforts to cool any uprisings by suppressing everything written, even harmless works of literature. In result, much more harmful (to Communism at least) works were perpetrated in secret in opposition to the force of evil. Dissident authors and writers wrote secretly, as their work (or even having it in possession) could land them into jail. But they did not quit, and if anything, while its exposure may have been limited to the literary few, it probably saved them mentally.

The novel begins with a woman being arrested who was secretly known for copying dissident works into books. Her son involved, she takes all the blame and is jailed. Lost for what to do, he himself a writer as well, wanders the underground (both literally and figuratively) trying to figure out what to do. Soon he meets an attractive woman who leads him on a path to produce his literature but with a theory: become famous in the outside world so much that Czech officials can't touch him without political repercussions.

But who is she, and what is her intentions?

"A curious thought entered my mind: that she had quite separate lives. The thought no sooner occurred than it became a knife of jealousy. The girl who cultivated dissidents, what was exploring the world of the samizdat, who was in some strange way excited by the opportunity to recreate me as a hero and a martyr, was the holiday version of another being entirely."

Filled with beautiful and nuanced sentences, the novel contrasts the barbaric stomping out of words with the subtlety and pleasure of well-written prose. The author contrasts these so clearly that one can't help but feel the tension between the political forces at play and the hearts behind the written word. It's not idealistic, some of the samizdat writers were jerks too, not to be trusted and often arrogant. But their opposition, in whole, to the entire movement to destroy them only makes them more fascinating.

Scruton's writing is unusual. A narrator who thinks wisely and yet makes naive assumptions, who loves and yet distrusts; a complicated man in every sense.

“I rate it as the best board for the best road project in Australia," gushed NSW Roads Minister Duncan Gay of his own handiwork to the Sydney Morning Herald in November 2013. He was talking of the board for the Westconnex, a $12 billion 33-kilometre loop of motorways, tunnels and tolls that will link Parramatta in Sydney's west with the suburbs in the inner west and back out to south western Sydney Man behind men behind westconnex

Shining a light on injustice and corruption isn’t an easy job, but it’s a critical aspect of journalism and democracy. Walkley award-winning journalist Wendy Bacon has done just that, examining official corruption in NSW, miscarriages of justice, police corruption, indigenous issues, environmental issues and a plethora of other topics in her several decades as an investigative journalist. She’s a Professor of Journalism at UTS in Sydney and involved with its Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at wendybacon.com

Resistance
Songs: Mobilizing the Law and Politics of Community

Alfieri, Anthony Victor, Resistance Songs: Mobilizing the Law and
Politics of Community (February 24, 2015). University of Miami Legal Studies
Research Paper No. 2015-09; Texas Law Review, Vol. 93, Forthcoming. Available
for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2569159

“In 1925, the City of Miami
built a trash incinerator in the de jure segregated Afro-Caribbean-American
community of Coconut Grove Village West (“the West Grove”) amid rows of shotgun
style houses and Jim Crow schools. Commonly known as Old Smokey, the
incinerator discharged airborne carcinogenic chemicals (e.g., arsenic,
benzo(a)pyrene, cadmium, and lead) and produced residual toxic waste (e.g.,
ash, liquefied plastic, and melted glass) for 45 years until Florida courts
finally ordered it closed in 1970. In 1978, notwithstanding community
opposition, the City of Miami converted the 4.5 acre Old Smokey site and
incinerator building into its Fire-Rescue Training Center which continues to
operate today. In 2013 and 2014, West Grove residents working in collaboration
with faculty and students from the University of Miami School of Law learned
from a whistleblower-leaked municipal environmental report that long-term
exposure to Old Smokey’s airborne carcinogens and toxic waste dump sites had
caused extensive soil and possibly groundwater contamination of homeowner
properties and public parks in Coconut Grove and across the City of Miami and
Miami-Dade County. This Essay investigates the historical absence of civil
rights- and environmental justice-incited legal and political mobilization
around Old Smokey in light of Professor Lea VanderVelde’s important new book
Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott. For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment. But I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life, because that’s simply part of the human condition. - See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes/190351/#sthash.onvwDxDX.dpufProfessors How Paranoia Strikes

When writing a novel, he has to finish it within 40 days due to his limited time off from teaching at a university, Ha said. "I finish a bottle of whiskey every two or three days to keep total concentration on my work."

The history of literature is not tidy, and the path of the modern novel is particularly long and improbable. Can its origins be traced to Iron Curtains of Protestantism

“Take those demons, for example. For some of us, writing is not a matter of being driven by them, but casting them out. Difficult family relationships? Sort them out on the page. Horrible love life? Write it again with a better ending. Feeling your age? Slip into the skin of a 20 year old and go off and have some fictional adventures. It’s not a horrible, exhausting struggle; it’s therapeutic.” The Guardian: Writers

In the Wall Street Journal Jennifer Maloney previews a new site, suggesting Literary Hub Is a New Home for Book Lovers, which: 'aims to carve out a central online space for books'. This 'Literary Hub' is scheduled to go live 8 April and -- scroll down -- given the "partners' involved (a really nice mix) should be able to offer some interesting content. Apparently:

Focusing on literary fiction and nonfiction, it will present personal and critical essays, interviews and book excerpts

(Maloney observes parenthetically; "Organizers are still discussing whether it should publish its own book reviews".)

“A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”

~ Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”Cold River was a first roll of the dice for me as a memoir writer...At 81, John Hatton is learning to ski and has returned from six weeks in New Zealand, which is why he missed the ACT Supreme Court’s reference last month to Mafia involvement in Colin Winchester’s murder. Organised crime figures who believed they had been double-crossed were said to have a motive for killing assistant federal police commissioner Winchester, but police had been unwilling to reinvestigate Mafia links. John Hatton

Authors publishing through both traditional and independent methods
earned $7,500-$9,999 per year, thousands more than authors who published
with either method exclusively.
“While some scholars may
shun such developments, others are embracing them, leveraging analytical
tools and techniques to account for a landscape of authorship and
reading that is no longer confined to simple geometries and lines of
influence, and no longer served by the established critical schools.”
~ Can You Really Know An Author If You Don’t Follow Him Social Media Dragon? Los Angeles Review of Books

“I realize I don’t want
any record of my days. I have the kind of brain that erases everything
that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sweeping up the path as he
progresses along it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how
old I was when this or that happened – and I like it that way.” Why Zadie Smith Will Not Keep A Diary Ever Rookie

“We often know very little
about those who live closely and share the lives of the writers about
whom we apparently know so much. Part of this is wilful mythologizing.
We like to think of the writer as indestructible as the text, preferring
not to imagine who might make them breakfast in the morning or help
them put on their shoes when they are too old to manage it by
themselves.” A look at “Miss Alice” Lee, Ted Hughes, John Bayley,
Leonard Woolf, and Valerie Eliot. Malchkeons Who Stay: The Lives Of Writers’ Companions Melville House

The power to spread and
transform the alphabet — once concentrated among medieval scribes,
British and French printers, or Christian missionaries spreading words
to spread the Word — has been democratized. Now with tablets and
smartphones, “the smallest building blocks of the shared written
language (i.e. print) are more in your hands . . . than they have ever
been. Washington Post

“The research suggests
fantasy stories — or at least those good enough to hold our interest —
produce neural reactions that are above and beyond those created by
other narratives — even ones that are just as exciting, involving, or
humorous.”
Fantasy X Stories subtitled: Parliamentary Library Stack on Level 6 Pacific Standard

“What does this movement
in travel writing bear for the genre as a whole? What can the graves of
dead poets in Vrbov and Venice, a boat ride down the Amazon to the coast of
Brazil, or a visit to the homes of D. H. Lawrence and George Eliot tell
us about life, about living?”Los Angeles Review of Books

“This idea Franzen posits
that literature teaches us you’re not the ‘heroic figure you think of
yourself as, that you might be the very dubious figure that other people
think of you as’ is as deeply embedded in many big YA novels as it is
in Munro stories. To say these books are simplistic is to mistake
grandness, ease of narrative, and breathless pace for mere shallowness.”

“Getting
an author booked on ‘The Daily Show’ was often the Holy Grail for book
publicists,” says Kate Lloyd, Scribner’s associate director of
publicity. Her authors loved Stewart, she says, because “his audience is
made up of smart, book-buying readers who respond to the thoughtful
treatment and authentic passion he customarily expresses for the books
he features.”

Digital Book World’s new survey
of just under 1,900 authors found fairly low annual earnings. Dana Beth
Weinberg tells the Guardian, “We see for the third year in a row – even
though we made a strong effort to get representation in the survey from
successful indie authors – that most authors aren’t making much money
and most books sell very few copies. We also find that traditionally
published authors and authors who combine traditional and indie
publishing have higher annual incomes on average than indie-only
authors. Last year, we took a lot of heat for these unpopular findings,
especially from the indie community.”

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Most of us do not like risk and uncertainty. That's too bad, because there's no shortage of either. Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down. Living at risk is taking a leaf out of Elie Wiesel's statement: to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all
Small swimming strokes and walking steps towards a much better world... That is sometimes the sins, moral failings and dark truths of the human condition find a home at Media Dragon...The hard core irony will undoubtedly be lost on some except gals and guys at the Google news, but by failing to reach NY Times reviews, Cold River, a book of a lifetime, succeeds brilliantly. Without any doubt the story of the human race is war
... “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr

We are in love with our own sins ...
We are not the boys we used to be. We are no longer desirable, We are off-putting in some way. It’s not just that We have put on weight, or that our face are puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over us, they can see it in my face, the way we hold ourselves the way we move ...

Maybe we are crazy. Maybe we will change the world: If you live life to the point of tears every Negative has a Positive, You just have to look for it. Blogs Help to filter the world ;-) Without Struggle/No Freedom ...

Sole survivors might often be thought of as anonymous, but we never want to be voiceless. Why true stories and icebergs say so much ... The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Till taught by pain or borders less travelled, men really know not what freedom's worth: # Each Age Calls forth its own Bohemian Voice...

Sandra Cisneros tells us, Write about what makes you different.
Your readers want to see the world through your eyes ... A sole survivor explores the world where the 'other' fears to tread and creates the most unlikely true story you'll ever read. You are different and so is Cold River:

There may be no greater act of bravery for someone with a fear of needles than to donate blood. Of course, it's this kind of giving that is so important to maintaining the Red Cross's life-saving stocks

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist, wrote Salman Rushdie. The Iron Curtain came down since Rushdie's novel, the Satanic Verses, earned the Booker Prize-winning novelist death threats, but the question persists.

MEDIA DRAGON We search the world ... So you can read thoughtful and down to earth media dragons at one place

Can one person make a difference? It's easy to be cynical about the power of one. But a person's importance, so difficult to quantify in life, is perhaps more easily measured in death – and the gaping holes left behind